Abstract:

The relevance of the opinion of citizens has increased in the last decade. Today, many administrations in many countries use to set up public participation processes as one more of the inputs required to make a decision in the controversial aspects of governance. To ease the accesses of citizens to such processes, e-Participation initiatives are used. Several e-Participation frameworks and applications developed ad-hoc have been proposed to respond to a specific initiative. Nevertheless, a software that covers the entire process of an e-Participation initiative, providing methodological guidance, has not been developed yet. In this paper, we introduce ePfw, a framework for help the definition and implementation of e-Participation processes. This framework is developed using design science research. ePfw models all the components, stages, activities and information flows that occur in an e-Participation process. The metamodel shows a structural perspective in which the properties of the entities participating in the e-Participation processes are specified. Next, the functionality and evaluation of ePfwTool, a tool a support tool for the ePfw framework, is presented. Finally, the results of the evaluation carried out by expert users in e-Participation are shown